James Baldwin

Preacher Vs. Writer

Abstract

J. Michael Lennon evaluates James Campbell’s biography Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin, focusing on Baldwin’s lifelong tension between his roles as moral preacher and literary artist. Lennon highlights Campbell’s central argument that Baldwin’s prophetic public voice increasingly competed with, and at times overshadowed, his ambitions as a novelist, producing uneven results across his later fiction. The review carefully traces Campbell’s assessments of Baldwin’s novels and essays, emphasizing the biographer’s claim that Baldwin’s greatest artistic achievements reside in his nonfiction, where the essay form allowed his intellect, rhetorical force, and moral urgency to converge most effectively. Lennon situates the biography within the broader resurgence of Baldwin’s cultural prominence in the wake of Black Lives Matter and contemporary reassessments of race, sexuality, and political engagement. By engaging Campbell’s critical judgments with nuance and occasional agreement or dissent, the review presents Talking at the Gates as an indispensable, if unsparing, portrait of a major American writer whose literary legacy remains inseparable from the burdens of public witness.